Here Now There Yeah
by T. Adamson

Pausing to reflect on Bailey William’s wonderful play The Family Dog, I can’t help but think of Gertrude Stein’s famous observation in Everybody’s Autobiography, upon returning to the now unrecognizably altered Oakland of her childhood- “There is no there there.”

I marvel at how true, how succinct, this statement rings to me whenever I travel back to Austin, the city I declare myself from, how much both that city and I have changed since I moved to NYC almost two decades ago. I think back to my seventeen-year-old self, who brazenly (one might say foolishly) decided that he would move hundreds of miles away from his family to a city where he didn’t know a single living soul, to study theater, with what I can now admit was the tacit, brutally naïve expectation that he would be allowed to change and to create a new self while simultaneously expecting the rest of his family to hold down the fort back home, encased in metaphorical amber, unchanged, always dependably there.

Of course the world delights in upending such youthful expectations, both in reality and in this play.

In my own plane of reality over the past eighteen years, those expectations have been systematically been upended by divorces, remarriages, ruptures and sudden reconciliations, by diseases, relocations, politics, and by many deaths indeed, human and animal. With dramatic flair, Bailey adds addiction, religious piety, secrecy, bigotry and more to this list of disruptive forces. But one noteworthy disruptor to which The Family Dog pays particular attention is the unshakably uncanny omnipresence of the cellphone.

Like so many of us, even when the Everett’s are still there in this play, still together, they are not there there. It’s as if Bailey is flipping Gertrude Stein’s formula in order to say that nowadays the problem is not only that there is no there there, it is that there is also no me here. Gambling, texting, working, gaming, gooning?, sharing miracles and revelations through their cellphone screens, the Everetts have become brazen (one might say foolish) itinerants, wandering therelessly through digital non-space, creating new digital selves on their apparatuses, simultaneously expecting everyone else to hold down the fort while they’re away.

It’s beautiful and heartbreaking to me that Winona laments “I’m never going to figure out how to be with my mom, am I?” for Tina to later fume in a separate scene “Nobody wants me to talk so I have to look at my stupid goddamn phone that I hate instead of being with my children that I never see.” Can they hear each other, I wonder, in how similar their frustrations are? Their obstructed shared longing to be together? Not to get too Theater Kid about it all, but these laments also take me back to the third act of Our Town, when Emily Webb returns home from far away indeed, longing for togetherness, only to find that home unrecognizable thanks to the distraction and disconnection she’d never noticed in her youthful innocence. Which brings me, at last, to the dog of it all.

Because Johnny is there. Or rather, like the Stage Manager in Our Town, he is both there and here, both in the theatrical world of the Everetts and here in the theater, with us. His constant attentive presence counters the distractedness, the disconnectedness, the awayness plaguing the Everetts. As a result, unsurprisingly, they have an easier time being with him than they have being with each other. In a way, he functions like a cellphone, another distractive harm-reduction device to turn to when conversation becomes too difficult and strained. But Bailey never lets us forget that Johnny is also always alive, always present, always family, a witness to the longings and self-deceptions of his brothers, sisters, and parents, calling back towards them from across language and distance, back towards togetherness, towards the always available options of yeah and now. Somehow he is able to be both there and here.

Because- for some strange human reason- our family dogs never leave us. My dog Shadow has never left me, even a decade after her death. In a strange way, I’ve felt like she’s been with me the entire time I’ve spent thinking about Bailey’s thrilling heartwrenching play, the entire time I’ve spent writing this essay, inconceivably far and impossibly close, holding down the fort of my heart.

Thank you, Bailey, for driving that truth home.